Radiocommunications are rapidly becoming a primary communication technology for many people around the world. Mobile phones, wireless personal digital assistants and pagers are only a few examples of end user devices employed in radiocommunication systems to provide rapid and convenient communication services to subscribers. With the advent of the Internet, wireless access to, for example, the World Wide Web is widely anticipated as the next generation of radiocommunication systems are being developed. Naturally, such next generation systems are intended to provide greater throughput to support high bandwidth data communications. However, in addition to providing greater throughput, such new technologies invariably bring with them the opportunity for new services that can be offered to subscribers. In turn, these new services require the development of new capabilities between a user's wireless terminal (whatever form it may take), the fixed part of the radiocommunication system which is supporting wireless communications with that terminal and other networks that are accessed as a result of such communications (e.g., the Internet), as part of the implementation of the service. Accordingly, another challenge facing next generation designers is to implement and refine new capabilities to provide the building blocks for services to be implemented in next generation systems.
An example of a new service which is certain to be implemented as, for example, a wireless Internet application is the provision of specific content to a terminal based upon some terminal characteristic, e.g., the subscription associated with the terminal or the terminal's position. For example, a service could be implemented to provide a list of hotels or restaurants which are close to the wireless terminal's current position. To enable such a service, it may be useful to transmit user-related information (e.g., hotel/restaurant preference, the terminal's position, etc.) to an origin server which can then generate and return content specifically adapted to the user or terminal.
This type of service can be implemented using the recently developed Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), and more particularly, by exchanging terminal position and other information between and among. WAP terminals, gateways and servers. For general information regarding WAP, the interested reader is referred to http:/www.wapforum.org/, the contents of which are incorporated here by reference, since only certain WAP details of interest for understanding the present invention are mentioned here. For example, the User Agent Profile defined by the WAP Forum Applications group includes a mechanism which allows for the transmission of position information based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) application Resource Description Framework (RDF). More information regarding WAP User Agent Profiles can be found at http://www1.wapforum.org/tech/documents/SPEC-UAProf-19991110.pdf, the contents of which are incorporated hereby reference. Moreover, a more detailed example of how these WAP functions conventionally operate to provide position information is provided below with respect to FIGS. 1 and 2. Briefly, however, using a conventional WAP approach, the position attribute is appended to the User Agent profile under the control of a gateway server, even when the position information is not required for the request sent by the user of the terminal device. As a result, the use of position information is inflexible, and the terminal user, or client, is unable to control whether position or other user-specific information is provided to an origin server as part of a request for information.
Thus, there is a need for improved methods and apparatus for exchanging position and other user-specific information between and among WAP terminals, gateways and servers.